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Title: The Great GatsbyAuthor: F. Scott FitzgeraldeBook No.: 0200041.txtEdition: 1Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: ASCIIDate first posted: January 2002Date most recently updated: January 2002

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title: The Great GatsbyAuthor: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,I must have you!"

THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS.

Chapter 1

1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advicethat I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "justremember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantagesthat you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicativein a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal morethan that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments,a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and alsomade me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mindis quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when itappears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college Iwas unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to thesecret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences wereunsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostilelevity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimaterevelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelationsof young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, areusually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reservingjudgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid ofmissing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies isparcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admissionthat it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wetmarshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted theworld to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; Iwanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into thehuman heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, wasexempt from my reaction--Gatsby, who represented everything for which Ihave an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series ofsuccessful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, someheightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were relatedto one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes tenthousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with thatflabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the"creative temperament."--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romanticreadiness such as I have never found in any other person and which itis not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all rightat the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in thewake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in theabortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Westerncity for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and wehave a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but theactual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in

2

fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesalehardware business that my father carries on to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him--withspecial reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs infather's office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of acentury after my father, and a little later I participated in thatdelayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed thecounter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of beingthe warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like theragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go East and learn the bondbusiness. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed itcould support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked itover as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said,"Why--ye--es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to financeme for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, Ithought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warmseason, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees,so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a housetogether in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He foundthe house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, butat the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went outto the country alone. I had a dog--at least I had him for a few daysuntil he ran away--and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bedand cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over theelectric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recentlyarrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, apathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me thefreedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on thetrees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiarconviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to bepulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozenvolumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stoodon my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising tounfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenasknew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of verysolemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News."--and now I was goingto bring back all such things into my life and become again that mostlimited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just anepigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window,after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one ofthe strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender

3

riotous island which extends itself due east of New York--and wherethere are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations ofland. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical incontour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the mostdomesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the greatwet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not perfect ovals--like theegg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contactend--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetualconfusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a morearresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular exceptshape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, thoughthis is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a littlesinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of theegg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two hugeplaces that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one onmy right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factualimitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool,and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. it was Gatsby's mansion.Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited bya gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was asmall eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of thewater, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consolingproximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Eggglittered along the water, and the history of the summer really beginson the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the TomBuchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known Tomin college. And just after the war I spent two days with them inChicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one ofthe most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--anational figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acutelimited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors ofanti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college hisfreedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicagoand come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: forinstance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthyenough to do that.

Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for noparticular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully whereverpeople played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move,said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sightinto Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking,a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverablefootball game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to EastEgg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house waseven more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white GeorgianColonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach

4

and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping oversun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reachedthe house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from themomentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows,glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windyafternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with hislegs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-hairedman of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face andgave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Noteven the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormouspower of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until hestrained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscleshifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a bodycapable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression offractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt init, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who hadhated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed tosay, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." Wewere in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate Ialways had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to likehim with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing aboutrestlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along thefront vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a halfacre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumpedthe tide offshore.

"It belonged to Demaine, the oil man." He turned me around again,politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space,fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grassoutside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breezeblew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the otherlike pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake ofthe ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making ashadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couchon which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchoredballoon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling andfluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flightaround the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the

5

whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caughtwind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the twoyoung women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full lengthat her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raiseda little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likelyto fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint ofit--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for havingdisturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightlyforward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd,charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into theroom.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she saidsomething very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into myface, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wantedto see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surnameof the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy'smurmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticismthat made it no less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almostimperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again--the objectshe was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her somethingof a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost anyexhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up anddown, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never beplayed again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitementin her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget:a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had donegay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East,and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheelpainted black as a mourning wreath, and there's a persistent wail allnight along the north shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. To-morrow!" Then she addedirrelevantly: "You ought to see the baby."

6

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's----"

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stoppedand rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing atDaisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more."I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said: "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that Istarted--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned andwith a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as longas I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted, "I've been trying to get you to NewYork all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from thepantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom ofa glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyedlooking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erectcarriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at theshoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back atme with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontentedface. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her,somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody

7

there."

"I don't know a single----"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced;wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelledme from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the twoyoung women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward thesunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminishedwind.

"Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with herfingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest dayof the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in theyear and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at thetable as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly:"What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on herlittle finger.

"Look!" she complained; "I hurt it."

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to,but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man,a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a----"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with abantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as coolas their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of alldesire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only apolite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knewthat presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening toowould be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from theWest, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward itsclose, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheernervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glassof corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or

8

something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in anunexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently."I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is ifwe don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression ofunthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them.What was that word we----"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at herimpatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us,who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will havecontrol of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociouslytoward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California--" began Miss Baker, but Tominterrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are,and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with aslight nod, and she winked at me again. "--And we've produced all thethings that go to make civilization--oh, science and art, and all that.Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency,more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almostimmediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisyseized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It'sabout the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over to-night."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher forsome people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began toaffect his nose----"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up

9

his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection uponher glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly asI listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her withlingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear,whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word wentinside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leanedforward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a--of a rose, anabsolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation:"An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was onlyextemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if herheart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of thosebreathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on thetable and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid ofmeaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" ina warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the roombeyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. Themurmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mountedexcitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised."I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don'tyou think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter ofa dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were backat the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gaiety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, andcontinued: "I looked outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic

10

outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingalecome over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away----" Hervoice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enoughafter dinner, I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook herhead decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact allsubjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of thelast five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again,pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tomwere thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to havemastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifthguest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperamentthe situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was totelephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and MissBaker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back intothe library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while,trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followedDaisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. Inits deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, andher eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulentemotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be somesedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly."Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick,and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more,and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of herdaughter.

"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you whatI said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was lessthan an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the etherwith an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if itwas a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head

11

away and wept. 'all right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hopeshe'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world,a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in aconvinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I KNOW.I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and shelaughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention,my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trickof some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited,and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirkon her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a ratherdistinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she readaloud to him from the SATURDAY EVENING POST.--the words, murmurous anduninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light,bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair,glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slendermuscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in ourvery next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and shestood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on theceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament to-morrow," explained Daisy,"over at Westchester."

"Oh--you're Jordan BAKER."

I knew now why her face was familiar--its pleasing contemptuousexpression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures ofthe sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. Ihad heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story,but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."

12

"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrangea marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of--oh--fling youtogether. You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and pushyou out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing----"

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."

"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let herrun around the country this way."

"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick'sgoing to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots ofweek-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be verygood for her."

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Ourbeautiful white----"

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?"demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me.

"I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race.Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing youknow----"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes laterI got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side byside in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisyperemptorily called: "Wait!"

"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you wereengaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you wereengaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again ina flower-like way. "We heard it from three people, so it must be true."

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguelyengaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of thereasons I had come East. You can't stop going with an old friend on

13

account of rumors, and on the other hand I had no intention of beingrumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotelyrich--nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I droveaway. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out ofthe house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentionsin her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York."was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if hissturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of waysidegarages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when Ireached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat fora while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blownoff, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees anda persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew thefrogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across themoonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was notalone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of myneighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pocketsregarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurelymovements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggestedthat it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share washis of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, andthat would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for he gavea sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out hisarms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him,I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--anddistinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away,that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsbyhe had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Chapter 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastilyjoins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as toshrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley ofashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges andhills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses andchimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, ofmen who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, givesout a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-graymen swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud,which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

14

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which driftendlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue andgigantic--their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but,instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over anonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there tofatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himselfinto eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes,dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on overthe solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and,when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers onwaiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half anhour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it wasbecause of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. Hisacquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popularrestaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, Ihad no desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York with Tom onthe train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumpedto his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from thecar.

"We're getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination tohave my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was thaton Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walkedback a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistentstare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow bricksitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Streetministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of thethree shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-nightrestaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was agarage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.--and I followedTom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was thedust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It hadoccurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and thatsumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when theproprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his handson a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, andfaintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into hislight blue eyes.

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on theshoulder. "How's business?"

15

"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you goingto sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it,maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----"

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. ThenI heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of awoman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middlethirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuouslyas some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark bluecrepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was animmediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her bodywere continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through herhusband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush inthe eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to herhusband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office,mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashendust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything inthe vicinity--except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded andmoved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs fromhis office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days beforethe Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny Italian child was settingtorpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with DoctorEckleburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumbhe doesn't know he's alive."

16

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York--or notquite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tomdeferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might beon the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretchedtight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform inNew York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of TOWN TATTLE. and amoving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store some cold creamand a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing driveshe let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from themass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately sheturned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on thefront glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get onefor the apartment. They're nice to have--a dog."

We backed up to a gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to JohnD. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen veryrecent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to thetaxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got thatkind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drewone up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointmentin his voice. "It's more of an Airedale." He passed his hand over thebrown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dogthat'll never bother you with catching cold."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you tendollars."

The Airedale--undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it somewhere,though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and settled downinto Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat withrapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

17

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy tenmore dogs with it."

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on thesummer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a greatflock of white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly.

"Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you,Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said tobe very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but----"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake ofapartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around theneighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases,and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in theelevator. "And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor--a small living-room, a smalldining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded tothe doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it,so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes ofladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture wasan over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurredrock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itselfinto a bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed downinto the room. Several old copies of TOWN TATTLE. lay on the tabletogether with a copy of SIMON CALLED PETER, and some of the smallscandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned withthe dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of straw andsome milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large,hard dog-biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucerof milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskeyfrom a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was thatafternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerfulsun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on thetelephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some atthe drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, soI sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of SIMONCALLED PETER.--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted

18

things, because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I calledeach other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arriveat the apartment-door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milkywhite. Her eye-brows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a morerakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of theold alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved aboutthere was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery braceletsjingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietaryhaste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wonderedif she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeatedmy question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had justshaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and hewas most respectful in his greeting to every one in the room. Heinformed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered laterthat he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wifewas shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pridethat her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven timessince they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was nowattired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, whichgave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone achange. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garagewas converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, herassertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as sheexpanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to berevolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, "most of thesefellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had awoman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me thebill you'd of thought she had my appendicitis out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.

"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their ownhomes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes whenI don't care what I look like."

19

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursuedMrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he couldmake something of it."

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair fromover her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKeeregarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved his handback and forth slowly in front of his face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bringout the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all theback hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I thinkit's----"

Her husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again, whereuponTom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice andmineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despairat the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keepafter them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to thedog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying thata dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed down-stairs."

"Two what?" demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK POINT--THE GULLS, and theother I call MONTAUK POINT--THE SEA."

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man namedGatsby's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That'swhere all his money comes from."

20

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted byMrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:

"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out,but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attentionto Tom.

"I'd like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. AllI ask is that they should give me a start."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter asMrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter ofintroduction, won't you Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he cando some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as heinvented. "GEORGE B. WILSON AT THE GASOLINE PUMP, or something likethat."

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of themcan stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't STAND them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is,why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd geta divorce and get married to each other right away."

"Doesn't she like Wilson either?"

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheardthe question, and it was violent and obscene.

"You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again."It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic, andthey don't believe in divorce."

Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaboratenessof the lie.

"When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going West tolive for a while until it blows over."

"It'd be more discreet to go to Europe."

21

"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got backfrom Monte Carlo."

"Really."

"Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay long?"

"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles.We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gyppedout of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful timegetting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!"

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the bluehoney of the Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called meback into the room.

"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almostmarried a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he wasbelow me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's 'way belowyou!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure."

"Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,"at least you didn't marry him."

"I know I didn't."

"Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's thedifference between your case and mine."

"Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Catherine. "Nobody forced you to."

Myrtle considered.

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally."I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lickmy shoe."

"You were crazy about him for a while," said Catherine.

"Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy abouthim? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that manthere."

She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly.I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.

"The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made amistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and nevereven told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.'oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'this is the first I ever heard aboutit.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the bandall afternoon."

22

"She really ought to get away from him," resumed Catherine to me."They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And tom's thefirst sweetie she ever had."

The bottle of whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by allpresent, excepting Catherine, who "felt just as good on nothing at all."Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches,which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walksouthward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I triedto go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled meback, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line ofyellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to thecasual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up andwondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelledby the inexhaustible variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breathpoured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always thelast ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see mysister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leathershoes, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked atme I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head.When we came into the station he was next to me, and his whiteshirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I'd have to calla policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got intoa taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subwaytrain. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't liveforever; you can't live forever.'"

She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificiallaughter.

"My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'mthrough with it. I've got to get another one to-morrow. I'm going tomake a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave,and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays whereyou touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother'sgrave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won'tforget all the things I got to do."

It was nine o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watchand found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fistsclenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out myhandkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of driedlather that had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes throughthe smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared,reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some timetoward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face

23

discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right tomention Daisy's name.

"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I wantto! Daisy! Dai----"

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with hisopen hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bath-room floor, and women'svoices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail ofpain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door.When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene--hiswife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here andthere among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and thedespairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spreada copy of TOWN TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat fromthe chandelier, I followed.

"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in theelevator.

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I wastouching it."

"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between thesheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . .Brook'n Bridge . . . ."

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the PennsylvaniaStation, staring at the morning TRIBUNE, and waiting for the fouro'clock train.

Chapter 3

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. Inhis blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among thewhisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in theafternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, ortaking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats

24

slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts offoam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing partiesto and from the city between nine in the morning and long pastmidnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug tomeet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extragardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammersand garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruitererin New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his backdoor in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in thekitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half anhour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler'sthumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with severalhundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmastree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished withglistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads ofharlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stockedwith gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most ofhis female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols andcornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers havecome in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars fromNew York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls andsalons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn instrange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. Thebar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate thegarden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, andcasual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, andenthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, andnow the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera ofvoices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groupschange more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in thesame breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weavehere and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under theconstantly changing light.

Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail outof the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands likeFrisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; theorchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is aburst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is GildaGray's understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one ofthe few guests who had actually been invited. People were notinvited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out

25

to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once therethey were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that theyconducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated withamusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsbyat all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its ownticket of admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's-eggblue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisinglyformal note from his employer: the honor would be entirely Gatsby's, itsaid, if I would attend his "little party." that night. He hadseen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before,but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it--signedJay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little afterseven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddiesof people I didn't know--though here and there was a face I had noticedon the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of youngEnglishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry,and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperousAmericans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds orinsurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of theeasy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a fewwords in the right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two orthree people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such anamazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements,that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only placein the garden where a single man could linger without lookingpurposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment whenJordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marblesteps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interestdown into the garden.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to some onebefore I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.

"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturallyloud across the garden.

"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up."I remembered you lived next door to----" She held my hand impersonally,as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave ear totwo girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win."

That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the weekbefore.

"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but wemet you here about a month ago."

26

"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and I started,but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to thepremature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer'sbasket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine, we descendedthe steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated atus through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls inyellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.

"Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girlbeside her.

"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alertconfident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you,Lucille?"

It was for Lucille, too.

"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always havea good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he askedme my name and address--inside of a week I got a package from Croirier'swith a new evening gown in it."

"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan.

"Sure I did. I was going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in thebust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Twohundred and sixty-five dollars."

"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that,"said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with ANYbody."

"Who doesn't?" I inquired.

"Gatsby. Somebody told me----"

The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.

"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward andlistened eagerly.

"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille sceptically; "it'smore that he was a German spy during the war."

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him inGermany," he assured us positively.

"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was inthe American army during the war." As our credulity switched back toher she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes whenhe thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."

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She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned andlooked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation heinspired that there were whispers about him from those who found littlethat it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The first supper--there would be another one after midnight--was nowbeing served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who werespread around a table on the other side of the garden. There werethree married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduategiven to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impressionthat sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her personto a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this partyhad preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself thefunction of representing the staid nobility of the country-side--EastEgg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against itsspectroscopic gayety.

"Let's get out," whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful andinappropriate half-hour. "This is much too polite for me."

We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host:I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. Theundergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there.She couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on theveranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walkedinto a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, andprobably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, wassitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring withunsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered hewheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously.

"About what?" He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. Iascertained. They're real."

"The books?"

He nodded.

"Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nicedurable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pagesand--Here! Lemme show you."

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases andreturned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures."

"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter.It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What

28

thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too--didn't cut the pages.But what do you want? What do you expect?"

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liableto collapse.

"Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was brought.Most people were brought."

Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.

"I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt," he continued. "Mrs. ClaudRoosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I'vebeen drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober meup to sit in a library."

"Has it?"

"A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet. I've only been herean hour. Did I tell you about the books? They're real. They're----"

"You told us." We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushingyoung girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couplesholding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in thecorners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualisticallyor relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo orthe traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor hadsung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and betweenthe numbers people were doing "stunts." all over the garden, while happy,vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stagetwins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act incostume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls.The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle ofsilver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of thebanjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man ofabout my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightestprovocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. Ihad taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changedbefore my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.

At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the ThirdDivision during the war?"

"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion."

"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'dseen you somewhere before."

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We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in France.Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had justbought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.

"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound."

"What time?"

"Any time that suits you best."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked aroundand smiled.

"Having a gay time now?" she inquired.

"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusualparty for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I wavedmy hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sentover his chauffeur with an invitation." For a moment he looked at me as ifhe failed to understand.

"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.

"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon."

"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host."

He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It wasone of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurancein it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--orseemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and thenconcentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. Itunderstood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed inyou as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that ithad precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped toconvey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at anelegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborateformality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before heintroduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking hiswords with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself, a butlerhurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him onthe wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of usin turn.

"If you want anything just ask for it, old sport," he urged me."Excuse me. I will rejoin you later."

When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to assure herof my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and

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corpulent person in his middle years.

"Who is he?" I demanded.

"Do you know?"

"He's just a man named Gatsby."

"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?"

"Now YOU'RE started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile."Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man." A dim background startedto take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.

"However, I don't believe it."

"Why not?" "I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he wentthere."

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I thinkhe killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. Iwould have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprangfrom the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York.That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my provincialinexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere and buya palace on Long Island Sound.

"Anyhow, he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subjectwith an urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties.They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leaderrang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we aregoing to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attractedso much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers,you know there was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension,and added: "Some sensation!" Whereupon everybody laughed.

"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as Vladimir Tostoff'sJAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD."

The nature of Mr. Tostoff's compositioneluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standingalone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another withapproving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on hisface and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. Icould see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that hewas not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemedto me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.When the JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD was over, girls were puttingtheir heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls wereswooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups, knowingthat some one would arrest their falls--but no one swooned backward on

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Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder, and no singingquartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one link.

"I beg your pardon."

Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.

"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would liketo speak to you alone."

"With me?" she exclaimed in surprise.

"Yes, madame."

She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment,and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she woreher evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--therewas a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned towalk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused andintriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room whichoverhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate, who was nowengaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and whoimplored me to join him, I went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow wasplaying the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young ladyfrom a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity ofchampagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly,that everything was very, very sad--she was not only singing, she wasweeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it withgasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quaveringsoprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for whenthey came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed aninky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. Ahumorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face,whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off intoa deep vinous sleep.

"She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained agirl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fightswith men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartetfrom East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men wastalking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, afterattempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferentway, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks--at intervals sheappeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: "Youpromised!" into his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was atpresent occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignantwives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised

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voices.

"Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."

"Never heard anything so selfish in my life."

"We're always the first ones to leave."

"So are we."

"Well, we're almost the last to-night," said one of the men sheepishly."The orchestra left half an hour ago."

In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyondcredibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives werelifted, kicking, into the night.

As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened andJordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last wordto her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly intoformality as several people approached him to say good-bye.

Jordan's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but shelingered for a moment to shake hands.

"I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long werewe in there?"

"Why, about an hour." "It was--simply amazing," she repeatedabstractedly. "But I swore I wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizingyou." She yawned gracefully in my face: "Please come and seeme. . . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. SigourneyHoward . . . My aunt . . ." She was hurrying off as she talked--her brownhand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.

Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, Ijoined the last of Gatsby's guests, who were clustered around him. Iwanted to explain that I'd hunted for him early in the evening and toapologize for not having known him in the garden.

"Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it anotherthought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiaritythan the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forgetwe're going up in the hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o'clock."

Then the butler, behind his shoulder: "Philadelphia wants you on the'phone, sir."

"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . goodnight."

"Good night."

"Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasantsignificance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desiredit all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . good night."

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But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over.Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre andtumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up, butviolently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby'sdrive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for thedetachment of the wheel, which was now getting considerable attention fromhalf a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their carsblocking the road, a harsh, discordant din from those in the rear had beenaudible for some time, and added to the already violent confusion ofthe scene.

A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood inthe middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from thetire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.

"See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch."

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first theunusual quality of wonder, and then the man--it was the late patron ofGatsby's library.

"How'd it happen?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I know nothing whatever about mechanics," he said decisively.

"But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?" "Don't ask me,"said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. "I know very littleabout driving--next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know."

"Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night."

"But I wasn't even trying," he explained indignantly, "I wasn't eventrying."

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.

"Do you want to commit suicide?"

"You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!"

"You don't understand," explained the criminal. "I wasn't driving. There'sanother man in the car."

The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained"Ah-h-h!" as the door of the coupe swung slowly open. The crowd--it wasnow a crowd--stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened widethere was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale,dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the

34

ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.

Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessantgroaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment beforehe perceived the man in the duster.

"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?"

"Look!"

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he staredat it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected thatit had dropped from the sky.

"It came off," some one explained.

He nodded.

"At first I din' notice we'd stopped."

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders,he remarked in a determined voice:

"Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?"

At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was,explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physicalbond.

"Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse."

"But the WHEEL'S off!"

He hesitated.

"No harm in trying," he said.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away andcut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moonwas shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, andsurviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. Asudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the greatdoors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, whostood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given theimpression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were allthat absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in acrowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely lessthan my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadowwestward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to theProbity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by theirfirst names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on

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little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a shortaffair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in theaccounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in mydirection, so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blowquietly away.

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was thegloomiest event of my day--and then I went up-stairs to the library andstudied investments and securities for a conscientious hour.There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into thelibrary, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night wasmellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel,and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night,and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women andmachines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue andpick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a fewminutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would everknow or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to theirapartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiledback at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At theenchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes,and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windowswaiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerksin the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were fivedeep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt asinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited,and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lightedcigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside. Imagining thatI, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimateexcitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I foundher again. At first I was flattered to go places with her, because shewas a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it wassomething more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort oftender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to theworld concealed something--most affectations conceal somethingeventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I foundwhat it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, sheleft a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then liedabout it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eludedme that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was arow that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had movedher ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approachedthe proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted hisstatement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have beenmistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I sawthat this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergencefrom a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this

36

unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when shewas very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to theworld and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you neverblame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on thatsame house party that we had a curious conversation about driving acar. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that ourfender flicked a button on one man's coat.

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be morecareful, or you oughtn't to drive at all."

"I am careful."

"No, you're not."

"Well, other people are," she said lightly.

"What's that got to do with it?"

"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make anaccident."

"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."

"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's whyI like you."

Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she haddeliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I lovedher. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakeson my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out ofthat tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signingthem: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certaingirl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on herupper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to betactfully broken off before I was free.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, andthis is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Chapter 4

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore,the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkledhilariously on his lawn.

"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between

37

his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found outthat he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystalglass."

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the namesof those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-tablenow, disintegrating at its folds, and headed "This schedule in effectJuly 5th, 1922." But I can still read the gray names, and they will giveyou a better impression than my generalities of those who acceptedGatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothingwhatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and aman named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, whowas drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the WillieVoltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in acorner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr.Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turnedcotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came onlyonce, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum namedEtty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadlesand the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams ofGeorgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was therethree days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on thegravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his righthand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well oversixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga thetobacco importer, and Beluga's girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck andCecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, whocontrolled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and DonS. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with themovies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G.Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife.Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B.("Rot-Gut.") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came togamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he wascleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitablynext day.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he becameknown as "the boarder."--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatricalpeople there were Gus Waize and Horace O'donavan and Lester Meyer andGeorge Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromesand the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and theCorrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W.Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and HenryL. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway trainin Times Square.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite

38

the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one withanother that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I haveforgotten their names--Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloriaor Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious namesof flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great Americancapitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves tobe.

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'brien camethere at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who hadhis nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, hisfiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of theAmerican Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be herchauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name,if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.

All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.

At nine o'clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby's gorgeous carlurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melodyfrom its three-noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me,though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane,and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.

"Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me to-day and Ithought we'd ride up together."

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with thatresourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes,I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youthand, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner inthe shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always atapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

"It's pretty, isn't it, old sport?" He jumped off to give me a betterview. "Haven't you ever seen it before?"

I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, brightwith nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length withtriumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with alabyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behindmany layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we startedto town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month andfound, to my disappointment, that he had little to say: So my firstimpression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, hadgradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborateroad-house next door.

39

And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn't reached West Eggvillage before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinishedand slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloredsuit.

"Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion ofme, anyhow?" A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions whichthat question deserves.

"Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life," he interrupted."I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories youhear."

So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation inhis halls.

"I'll tell you God's truth." His right hand suddenly ordered divineretribution to stand by. "I am the son of some wealthy people in theMiddle West--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated atOxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.It is a family tradition."

He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he waslying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it, orchoked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt,his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn'tsomething a little sinister about him, after all.

"What part of the Middle West?" I inquired casually.

"San Francisco."

"I see."

"My family all died and I came into a good deal of money."

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clanstill haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg,but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals ofEurope--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, huntingbig game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying toforget something very sad that had happened to me long ago."

With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The veryphrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of aturbaned "character." leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued atiger through the Bois de Boulogne.

"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very

40

hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted acommission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest Itook two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a halfmile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. Westayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men withsixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they foundthe insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I waspromoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me adecoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the AdriaticSea!"

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them--withhis smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history andsympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. Itappreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which hadelicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. Myincredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimminghastily through a dozen magazines.

He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fellinto my palm.

"That's the one from Montenegro."

To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.

"Orderi di Danilo," ran the circular legend, "Montenegro, Nicolas Rex."

"Turn it."

"Major Jay Gatsby," I read, "For Valour Extraordinary."

"Here's another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It wastaken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster."

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in anarchway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby,looking a little, not much, younger--with a cricket bat in his hand.

Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palaceon the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, withtheir crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

"I'm going to make a big request of you to-day," he said, pocketing hissouvenirs with satisfaction, "so I thought you ought to know somethingabout me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody. You see,I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and theretrying to forget the sad thing that happened to me." He hesitated."You'll hear about it this afternoon."

"At lunch?"

"No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Bakerto tea."

"Do you mean you're in love with Miss Baker?"

41

"No, old sport, I'm not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speakto you about this matter."

I hadn't the faintest idea what "this matter." was, but I was moreannoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan to tea in order to discussMr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterlyfantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I'd ever set foot upon hisoverpopulated lawn.

He wouldn't say another word. His correctness grew on him as we nearedthe city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse ofred-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined withthe dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds. Thenthe valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpseof Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as wewent by.

With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half LongIsland City--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of theelevated I heard the familiar "jug--jug--SPAT!" of a motorcycle, and afrantic policeman rode alongside.

"All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a whitecard from his wallet, he waved it before the man's eyes.

"Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you nexttime, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!"

"What was that?" I inquired.

"The picture of Oxford?"

"I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me aChristmas card every year."

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making aconstant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across theriver in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out ofnon-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is alwaysthe city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all themystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by twocarriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages forfriends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and shortupper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight ofGatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As wecrossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a whitechauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. Ilaughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us inhaughty rivalry.

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought;"anything at all. . . ."

42

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

Roaring noon. In a well--fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsbyfor lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyespicked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.

"Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem."

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with twofine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment Idiscovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

"--So I took one look at him," said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my handearnestly, "and what do you think I did?"

"What?" I inquired politely.

But evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped my hand andcovered Gatsby with his expressive nose.

"I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid: 'all right, Katspaugh,don't pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.' He shut it then andthere."

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into therestaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he wasstarting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.

"Highballs?" asked the head waiter.

"This is a nice restaurant here," said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at thePresbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I like across the street better!"

"Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hotover there."

"Hot and small--yes," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "but full of memories."

"What place is that?" I asked.

"The old Metropole.

"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. "Filled with facesdead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget solong as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of usat the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it wasalmost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and sayssomebody wants to speak to him outside. 'all right,' says Rosy, and beginsto get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.

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"'Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don't you,so help me, move outside this room.'

"It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blindswe'd of seen daylight."

"Did he go?" I asked innocently.

"Sure he went." Mr. Wolfshiem's nose flashed at me indignantly. "Heturned around in the door and says: 'Don't let that waiter take awaymy coffee!' Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot himthree times in his full belly and drove away."

"Four of them were electrocuted," I said, remembering.

"Five, with Becker." His nostrils turned to me in an interested way."I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion."

The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answeredfor me:

"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn't the man."

"No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.

"This is just a friend. I told you we'd talk about that some othertime."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man."

A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the moresentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat withferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around theroom--he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directlybehind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken oneshort glance beneath our own table.

"Look here, old sport," said Gatsby, leaning toward me, "I'm afraid Imade you a little angry this morning in the car."

There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.

"I don't like mysteries," I answered. "And I don't understand why youwon't come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got tocome through Miss Baker?"

"Oh, it's nothing underhand," he assured me. "Miss Baker's a greatsportswoman, you know, and she'd never do anything that wasn't all right."

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried from the room,leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

"He has to telephone," said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes."Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman."

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"Yes."

"He's an Oggsford man."

"Oh!"

"He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?"

"I've heard of it."

"It's one of the most famous colleges in the world."

"Have you known Gatsby for a long time?" I inquired.

"Several years," he answered in a gratified way. "I made the pleasure ofhis acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man offine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: 'There'sthe kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother andsister.'." He paused. "I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn'tbeen looking at them, but I did now.

They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

"Finest specimens of human molars," he informed me.

"Well!" I inspected them. "That's a very interesting idea."

"Yeah." He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. "Yeah, Gatsby's verycareful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend's wife."

When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and satdown Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.

"I have enjoyed my lunch," he said, "and I'm going to run off from youtwo young men before I outstay my welcome."

"Don't hurry, Meyer," said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiemraised his hand in a sort of benediction.

"You're very polite, but I belong to another generation," he announcedsolemnly. "You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies andyour----" He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand."As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself on you anylonger."

As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling.I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.

"He becomes very sentimental sometimes," explained Gatsby. "This is one ofhis sentimental days. He's quite a character around New York--a denizen of

45

Broadway."

"Who is he, anyhow, an actor?"

"No."

"A dentist?"

"Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then addedcoolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919."

"Fixed the World's Series?" I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World's Serieshad been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would havethought of it as a thing that merely HAPPENED, the end of someinevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start toplay with the faith of fifty million people--with the single-mindednessof a burglar blowing a safe.

"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.

"He just saw the opportunity."

"Why isn't he in jail?"

"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."

I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caughtsight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

"Come along with me for a minute," I said; "I've got to say hello to someone." When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in ourdirection.

"Where've you been?" he demamded eagerly. "Daisy's furious because youhaven't called up."

"This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan."

They shook hands briefly, and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassmentcame over Gatsby's face.

"How've you been, anyhow?" demanded Tom of me. "How'd you happen to comeup this far to eat?"

"I've been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby."

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen----

(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight

46

chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)

--I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks andhalf on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes fromEngland with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, andwhenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of allthe houses stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT, in a disapprovingway.

The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged toDaisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, andby far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. Shedressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day longthe telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from CampTaylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. "Anyways,for an hour!"

When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was besidethe curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seenbefore. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me untilI was five feet away.

"Hello, Jordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here."

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the oldergirls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross andmake bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't comethat day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a waythat every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because itseemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His namewas Jay Gatsby, and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over fouryears--even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was thesame man.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself,and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often.She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all.Wild rumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found herpacking her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-by to asoldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but shewasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. Afterthat she didn't play around with the soldiers any more, but onlywith a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town, who couldn'tget into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debutafter the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to aman from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with

47

more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He camedown with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a wholefloor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave hera string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridaldinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night inher flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey. she had a bottle ofSauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

"'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before, but oh how I doenjoy it."

"What's the matter, Daisy?"

I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.

"Here, deares'." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with heron the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em down-stairs andgive 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' hermine. Say: 'Daisy's change' her mine!'."

She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found hermother's maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. Shewouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her andsqueezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in thesoap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

But she didn't say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and putice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half anhour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around herneck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married TomBuchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months'trip to the South Seas.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I'dnever seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for aminute she'd look around uneasily, and say: "Where's Tom gone?" andwear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in thedoor. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour,rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomabledelight. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in ahushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left SantaBarbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and rippeda front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into thepapers, too, because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaidsin the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for ayear. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and thenthey came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago,as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and richand wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink

48

among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover,you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody elseis so blind that they don't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went infor amour at all--and yet there's something in that voice of hers. . . .

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first timein years. It was when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsbyin West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke meup, and said: "What Gatsby?" and when I described him--I was halfasleep--she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she usedto know. It wasn't until then that I connected this Gatsby with theofficer in her white car.

When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plazafor half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park.The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars inthe West Fifties, and the clear voices of girls, already gathered likecrickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

"I'm the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you're are asleep Into your tent I'll creep----"

"It was a strange coincidence," I said.

"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."

"Why not?"

"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspiredon that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from thewomb of his purposeless splendor.

"He wants to know," continued Jordan, "if you'll invite Daisy to yourhouse some afternoon and then let him come over."

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought amansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths--so that he could"come over." some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

"Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?"

"He's afraid, he's waited so long. He thought you might be offended.You see, he's a regular tough underneath it all."

Something worried me.

"Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?"

"He wants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is rightnext door."

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"Oh!"

"I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties,some night," went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began askingpeople casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found.It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should haveheard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediatelysuggested a luncheon in New York--and I thought he'd go mad:

"'I don't want to do anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want tosee her right next door.'

"When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's, he started to abandonthe whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he'sread a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpseof Daisy's name."

It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my armaround Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her todinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but ofthis clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, andwho leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase beganto beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only thepursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."

"And Daisy ought to have something in her life," murmured Jordan to me.

"Does she want to see Gatsby?"

"She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You'rejust supposed to invite her to tea."

We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninthStreet, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park.Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied facefloated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up thegirl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and soI drew her up again closer, this time to my face.

Chapter 5

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment thatmy house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsulawas blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thinelongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that itwas Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.

50

At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolveditself into "hide-and-go-seek." or "sardines-in-the-box." with all thehouse thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind inthe trees, which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on againas if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away Isaw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

"Your place looks like the World's Fair," I said.

"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancinginto some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car."

"It's too late."

"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven't made useof it all summer."

"I've got to go to bed."

"All right."

He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.

"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call upDaisy to-morrow and invite her over here to tea."

"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you toany trouble."

"What day would suit you?"

"What day would suit YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to putyou to any trouble, you see."

"How about the day after to-morrow?" He considered for a moment. Then,with reluctance:

"I want to get the grass cut," he said.

We both looked at the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawnended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected thathe meant my grass.

"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked.

"Oh, it isn't about that. At least----" He fumbled with a series ofbeginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old sport, you don't makemuch money, do you?"

"Not very much."

This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my--You see, I carry on a

51

little business on the side, a sort of side line, you understand. And Ithought that if you don't make very much--You're selling bonds, aren'tyou, old sport?"

"Trying to."

"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of yourtime and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to bea rather confidential sort of thing."

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation mighthave been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer wasobviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choiceexcept to cut him off there.

"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't takeon any more work."

"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently hethought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion." mentioned at lunch,but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'dbegin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he wentunwillingly home.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into adeep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or notGatsby went to Coney Island, or for how many hours he "glanced intorooms." while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from theoffice next morning, and invited her to come to tea.

"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.

"What?"

"Don't bring Tom."

"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently.

The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in araincoat, dragging a lawn-mower, tapped at my front door and said thatMr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that Ihad forgotten to tell my Finn to come back, so I drove into West EggVillage to search for her among soggy, whitewashed alleys and to buysome cups and lemons and flowers.

The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrivedfrom Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hourlater the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby, in a white flannelsuit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie, hurried in. He was pale, andthere were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately.

"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean."

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"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He lookedout the window at it, but, judging from his expression, I don't believehe saw a thing.

"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said theythought the rain would stop about four. I think it was the JOURNAL. Haveyou got everything you need in the shape of--of tea?"

I took him into the pantry, where he looked a little reproachfully at theFinn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessenshop.

"Will they do?" I asked.

"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .oldsport."

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist, through whichoccasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyesthrough a copy of Clay's ECONOMICS, starting at the Finnish tread thatshook the kitchen floor, and peering toward the bleared windows from timeto time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were takingplace outside. Finally he got up and informed me, in an uncertain voice,that he was going home.

"Why's that?"

"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as ifthere was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't waitall day."

"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four."

He sat down miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously therewas the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up, and,a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a large open car was coming up thedrive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath athree-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstaticsmile.

"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I hadto follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone,before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash ofblue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops asI took it to help her from the car.

"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear, "or why did I haveto come alone?"

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"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go faraway and spend an hour."

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur: "His name isFerdie."

"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living-room was deserted.

"Well, that's funny," I exclaimed.

"What's funny?"

She turned her head as there was a light dignified knocking at the frontdoor. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his handsplunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle ofwater glaring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into thehall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into theliving-room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my ownheart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living-room Iheard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy'svoice on a clear artificial note: "I certainly am awfully glad to seeyou again."

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I wentinto the room.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against themantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of adefunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position his distraught eyesstared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but graceful, on theedge of a stiff chair.

"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily atme, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckilythe clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of hishead, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and setit back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of thesofa and his chin in his hand.

"I'm sorry about the clock," he said.

My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster upa single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.

"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on

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the floor.

"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-factas it could ever be.

"Five years next November."

The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least anotherminute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion thatthey help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it inon a tray.

Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decencyestablished itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and, while Daisyand I talked, looked conscientiously from one to the other of us withtense, unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself, Imade an excuse at the first possible moment, and got to my feet.

"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.

"I'll be back."

"I've got to speak to you about something before you go."

He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door, and whispered:

"Oh, God!" in a miserable way.

"What's the matter?"

"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side toside, "a terrible, terrible mistake."

"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy'sembarrassed too."

"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously.

"Just as much as you are."

"Don't talk so loud."

"You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently. "Not onlythat, but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone."

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettablereproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the other room.

I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made hisnervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a hugeblack knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain.Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved byGatsby's gardener, abounded in small, muddy swamps and prehistoric

55

marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree exceptGatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his churchsteeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period."craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to payfive years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners wouldhave their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took theheart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediatedecline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on thedoor. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have alwaysbeen obstinate about being peasantry.

After half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer's automobilerounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner--Ifelt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upperwindows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from alarge central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time Iwent back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur oftheir voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts ofemotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen withinthe house too.

I went in--after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short ofpushing over the stove--but I don't believe they heard a sound. Theywere sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as ifsome question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige ofembarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears, and when Icame in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief beforea mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding.He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a newwell-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. Ithought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

"It's stopped raining."

"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about, that there weretwinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man,like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news toDaisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped raining."

"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told onlyof her unexpected joy.

"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he said, "I'd like toshow her around."

"You're sure you want me to come?"

"Absolutely, old sport."

Daisy went up-stairs to wash her face--too late I thought with humiliationof my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole

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front of it catches the light."

I agreed that it was splendid.

"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It tookme just three years to earn the money that bought it."

"I thought you inherited your money."

"I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it inthe big panic--the panic of the war."

I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him whatbusiness he was in he answered, "That's my affair," before he realizedthat it wasn't the appropriate reply.

"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in thedrug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in eitherone now." He looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've beenthinking over what I proposed the other night?"

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brassbuttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

"That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing.

"Do you like it?"

"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."

"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People whodo interesting things. Celebrated people."

Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road andentered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired thisaspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired thegardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthornand plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of brightdresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in thetrees.

And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms andRestoration salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behindevery couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until wehad passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton CollegeLibrary." I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break intoghostly laughter.

We went up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavendersilk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms,and bathrooms with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where adishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. Itwas Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrilyabout the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment,

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a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank aglass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revaluedeverything in his house according to the measure of response it drewfrom her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at hispossessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astoundingpresence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down aflight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser wasgarnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brushwith delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down andshaded his eyes and began to laugh.

"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't--WhenI try to----"

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third.After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed withwonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed itright through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at aninconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was runningdown like an overwound clock.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patentcabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, andhis shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selectionof things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall."

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one,before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel,which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table inmany-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the softrich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids incoral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms ofIndian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head intothe shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in thethick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautifulshirts before."

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and thehydroplane and the mid-summer flowers--but outside Gatsby's window itbegan to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugatedsurface of the Sound.

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said

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Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end ofyour dock."

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbedin what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that thecolossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Comparedto the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemedvery near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a starto the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count ofenchanted objects had diminished by one.

I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects inthe half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachtingcostume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.

"Who's this?"

"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."

The name sounded faintly familiar.

"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."

There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on thebureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly--taken apparentlywhen he was about eighteen.

"I adore it," exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you hada pompadour--or a yacht."

"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of clippings--aboutyou."

They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubieswhen the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.

"Yes. . . . well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, oldsport. . . . I said a SMALL town. . . . he must know what a small townis. . . . well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a smalltown. . . ."

He rang off.

"Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west,and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like tojust get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push youaround."

I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presencemade them feel more satisfactorily alone.

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"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play thepiano."

He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a fewminutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, withshell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently clothedin a "sport shirt," open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of anebulous hue.

"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely.

"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment."That is, I'd BEEN asleep. Then I got up. . . ."

"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you,Ewing, old sport?"

"I don't play well. I don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out ofprac----"

"We'll go down-stairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. Thegray windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. Helit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her ona couch far across the room, where there was no light save what thegleaming floor bounced in from the hall.

When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on thebench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.

"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm allout of prac----"

"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!"

"IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING, AIN'T WE GOT FUN----"

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along theSound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains,men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It wasthe hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating onthe air.

"ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME----"

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As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewildermenthad come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred tohim as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost fiveyears! There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, butbecause of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyondher, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creativepassion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every brightfeather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness canchallenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand tookhold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned towardher with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with itsfluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed--thatvoice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and theylooked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went outof the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them theretogether.

Chapter 6

About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived onemorning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.

"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely.

"Why--any statement to give out."

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heardGatsby's name around his office in a connection which he eitherwouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day offand with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."

It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby'snotoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted hishospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increasedall summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporarylegends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attachedthemselves to him, and there was one persistent story that hedidn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a houseand was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just whythese inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of NorthDakota, isn't easy to say.

James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He hadchanged it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that

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witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht dropanchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatzwho had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn greenjersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby whoborrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody thata wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. Hisparents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination hadnever really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was thatJay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonicconception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it meansanything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's business,the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he inventedjust the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would belikely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore ofLake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any othercapacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body livednaturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days.He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuousof them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the othersbecause they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelmingself-absorbtion he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesqueand fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universeof ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while theclock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wetlight his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to thepattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vividscene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided anoutlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of theunreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was foundedsecurely on a fairy's wing.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, tothe small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayedthere two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums ofhis destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work withwhich he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to LakeSuperior, and he was still searching for something to do on the daythat Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. Thetransactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionairefound him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him fromhis money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, thenewspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent himto sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalismof 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for fiveyears when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girls Point.

To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed

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deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. Isuppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people likedhim when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one ofthem elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick andextravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth andbought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachtingcap. And when the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the BarbaryCoast Gatsby left too.

He was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained withCody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor,for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon beabout, and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and moretrust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years, during which theboat went three times around the Continent. It might have lastedindefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one nightin Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a gray, floridman with a hard, empty face--the pioneer debauchee, who during one phaseof American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savageviolence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due toCody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay partieswomen used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed thehabit of letting liquor alone.

And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy of twenty-fivethousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the legaldevice that was used against him, but what remained of the millionswent intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriateeducation; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to thesubstantiality of a man.

He told me all this very much later, but I've put it down here with theidea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, whichweren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time ofconfusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything andnothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, whileGatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set ofmisconceptions away.

It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. Forseveral weeks I didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostlyI was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying toingratiate myself with her senile aunt--but finally I went over tohis house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't been there two minutes whensomebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled,naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't happenedbefore.

They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man named Sloane anda pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there previously.

"I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby, standing on his porch."I'm delighted that you dropped in."

As though they cared!

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"Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the roomquickly, ringing bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in justa minute."

He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would beuneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vagueway that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. Alemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,thanks. . . . I'm sorry----

"Did you have a nice ride?"

"Very good roads around here."

"I suppose the automobiles----"

"Yeah."

Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had acceptedthe introduction as a stranger.

"I believe we've met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan."

"Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously not remembering."So we did. I remember very well."

"About two weeks ago."

"That's right. You were with Nick here."

"I know your wife," continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

"That so?"

Tom turned to me.

"You live near here, Nick?"

"Next door."

"That so?"

Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation, but lounged back haughtilyin his chair; the woman said nothing either--until unexpectedly, aftertwo highballs, she became cordial.

"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested."What do you say?"

"Certainly; I'd be delighted to have you."

"Be ver' nice," said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought tobe starting home."

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"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now,and he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay forsupper? I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in fromNew York."

"You come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically."Both of you."

This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.

"Come along," he said--but to her only.

"I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."

Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go, and he didn't seethat Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't.

"I'm afraid I won't be able to," I said.

"Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.

Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.

"We won't be late if we start now," she insisted aloud.

"I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the army, butI've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car. Excuse mefor just a minute."

The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady beganan impassioned conversation aside.

"My God, I believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know shedoesn't want him?"

"She says she does want him."

"She has a big dinner party and he won't know a soul there." He frowned."I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may beold-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days tosuit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."

Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mountedtheir horses.

"Come on," said Mr. Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And thento me: "Tell him we couldn't wait, will you?"

Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod, andthey trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the Augustfoliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came outthe front door.

Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on thefollowing Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party. Perhaps

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his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness--itstands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer. Therewere the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the sameprofusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness thathadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it,grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its ownstandards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it hadno consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again,through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through neweyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers ofadjustment.

They arrived at twilight, and, as we strolled out among the sparklinghundreds, Daisy's voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

"These things excite me so," she whispered.

"If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let meknow and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Orpresent a green card. I'm giving out green----"

"Look around," suggested Gatsby.

"I'm looking around. I'm having a marvelous----"

"You must see the faces of many people you've heard about."

Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.

"We don't go around very much," he said. "In fact, I was just thinkingI don't know a soul here."

"Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely humanorchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisystared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies therecognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

"She's lovely," said Daisy.

"The man bending over her is her director."

He took them ceremoniously from group to group:

"Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitationhe added: "the polo player."

"Oh no," objected Tom quickly, "not me."

But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby, for Tom remained "the poloplayer." for the rest of the evening.

"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked thatman--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose."

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Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.

"Well, I liked him anyhow."

"I'd a little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'drather look at all these famous people in--in oblivion."

Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,conservative fox-trot--I had never seen him dance before. Then theysauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour, whileat her request I remained watchfully in the garden. "In case there's afire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of God."

Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together."Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A fellow'sgetting off some funny stuff."

"Go ahead," answered Daisy genially, "and if you want to take down anyaddresses here's my little gold pencil." . . . she looked around aftera moment and told me the girl was "common but pretty," and I knew thatexcept for the half-hour she'd been alone with Gatsby she wasn't havinga good time.

We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault--Gatsby hadbeen called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed these same people only twoweeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.

"How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?"

The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against myshoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.

"Wha'?"

A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golfwith her at the local club to-morrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence:

"Oh, she's all right now. When she's had five or six cocktails she alwaysstarts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone."

"I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused hollowly.

"We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebodythat needs your help, Doc.'"

"She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, without gratitude."But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool."

"Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool," mumbled MissBaedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey."

"Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet.

"Speak for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes.I wouldn't let you operate on me!"

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It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing withDaisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They werestill under the white plum tree and their faces were touching exceptfor a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that hehad been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain thisproximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degreeand kiss at her cheek.

"I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely."

But the rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture butan emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place."that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalledby its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the tooobtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothingto nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failedto understand.

I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. Itwas dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet oflight volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadowmoved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow,an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in aninvisible glass.

"Who is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"

"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired.

"I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people arejust big bootleggers, you know."

"Not Gatsby," I said shortly.

He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under hisfeet.

"Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerietogether."

A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy's fur collar.

"At least they're more interesting than the people we know," she saidwith an effort.

"You didn't look so interested."

"Well, I was."

Tom laughed and turned to me.

"Did you notice Daisy's face when that girl asked her to put her undera cold shower?"

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Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never hadbefore and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voicebroke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, andeach change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly."That girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he'stoo polite to object."

"I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom. "And I thinkI'll make a point of finding out."

"I can tell you right now," she answered. "He owned some drug-stores,a lot of drug-stores. He built them up himself."

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

"Good night, Nick," said Daisy.

Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps, whereTHREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, a neat, sad little waltz of that year,was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness ofGatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent fromher world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be callingher back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rareand to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who withone fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blotout those five years of unwavering devotion.

I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free,and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had runup, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights wereextinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down the steps atlast the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyeswere bright and tired.

"She didn't like it," he said immediately.

"Of course she did."

"She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."

He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

"I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand."

"You mean about the dance?"

"The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap ofhis fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant."

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say:"I never loved you." After she had obliterated four years with that

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sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back toLouisville and be married from her house--just as if it were fiveyears ago.

"And she doesn't understand," he said. "She used to be able tounderstand. We'd sit for hours----"

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rindsand discarded favors and crushed flowers.

"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in theshadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said,nodding determinedly. "She'll see."

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recoversomething, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he couldonce return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, hecould find out what that thing was. . . .

. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking downthe street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place wherethere were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool nightwith that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes ofthe year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into thedarkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of thecorner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks reallyformed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he couldclimb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on thepap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to hisown. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed hisunutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never rompagain like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longerto the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissedher. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and theincarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I wasreminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, thatI had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried totake shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as thoughthere was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. Butthey made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was

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uncommunicable forever.

Chapter 7

It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lightsin his house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as ithad begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did Ibecome aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into hisdrive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wonderingif he were sick I went over to find out--an unfamiliar butler with avillainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.

"Is Mr. Gatsby sick?"

"Nope." After a pause he added "sir." in a dilatory, grudging way.

"I hadn't seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carrawaycame over."

"Who?" he demanded rudely.

"Carraway."

"Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he slammed the door.

My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in hishouse a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who neverwent into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but orderedmoderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that thekitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village wasthat the new people weren't servants at all.

Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.

"Going away?" I inquired.

"No, old sport."

"I hear you fired all your servants."

"I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over quite often--inthe afternoons."

So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at thedisapproval in her eyes.

"They're some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They're allbrothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel."

"I see."

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He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I come to lunch ather house to-morrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour laterDaisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming.Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choosethis occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scenethat Gatsby had outlined in the garden.

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, ofthe summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only thehot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hushat noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion;the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her whiteshirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers,lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her pocket-bookslapped to the floor.

"Oh, my!" she gasped.

I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding itat arm's length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate thatI had no designs upon it--but every one near by, including the woman,suspected me just the same.

"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot!Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?"

My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

. . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a faint wind,carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as wewaited at the door.

"The master's body!" roared the butler into the mouthpiece. "I'm sorry,madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to touch this noon!"

What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see."

He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to takeour stiff straw hats.

"Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried, needlessly indicating thedirection. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to thecommon store of life.

The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy andJordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing downtheir own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.

"We can't move," they said together.

Jordan's fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment inmine.

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"And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?" I inquired.

Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the halltelephone.

Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson carpet and gazed around withfascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, excitinglaugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.

"The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on thetelephone."

We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance:"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'munder no obligations to you at all . . . and as for your bothering meabout it at lunch time, I won't stand that at all!"

"Holding down the receiver," said Daisy cynically.

"No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona-fide deal. I happen toknow about it."

Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with histhick body, and hurried into the room.

"Mr. Gatsby!" He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealeddislike. "I'm glad to see you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ."

"Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy.

As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulledhis face down, kissing him on the mouth.

"You know I love you," she murmured.

"You forget there's a lady present," said Jordan.

Daisy looked around doubtfully.

"You kiss Nick too."

"What a low, vulgar girl!"

"I don't care!" cried Daisy, and began to clog on the brick fireplace.Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just asa freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.

"Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding out her arms. "Come to yourown mother that loves you."

The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rootedshyly into her mother's dress.

"The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowyhair? Stand up now, and say--How-de-do."

Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small, reluctant hand.

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Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he hadever really believed in its existence before.

"I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning eagerly toDaisy.

"That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her face bent intothe single wrinkle of the small, white neck. "You dream, you. You absolutelittle dream."

"Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's got on a whitedress too."

"How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned her around so that shefaced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?"

"Where's Daddy?"

"She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like me.She's got my hair and shape of the face."

Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and heldout her hand.

"Come, Pammy."

"Good-by, sweetheart!"

With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to hernurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back,preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.

Gatsby took up his drink.

"They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension.

We drank in long, greedy swallows.

"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tomgenially. "It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into thesun--or wait a minute--it's just the opposite--the sun's getting colderevery year.

"Come outside," he suggested to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look atthe place."

I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in theheat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyesfollowed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.

"I'm right across from you."

"So you are."

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Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuseof the dog-days along-shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat movedagainst the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean andthe abounding blessed isles.

"There's sport for you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out therewith him for about an hour."

We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat,and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and theday after that, and the next thirty years?"

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it getscrisp in the fall."

"But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, "andeverything's so confused. Let's all go to town!"

Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding itssenselessness into forms.

"I've heard of making a garage out of a stable," Tom was saying toGatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage."

"Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby's eyesfloated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.With an effort she glanced down at the table.

"You always look so cool," she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He wasastounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and thenback at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew along time ago.

"You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently."You know the advertisement of the man----"

"All right," broke in Tom quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go totown. Come on--we're all going to town."

He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife.No one moved.

"Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter, anyhow?If we're going to town, let's start."

His hand, trembling with his effort at self-control, bore to his lips thelast of his glass of ale. Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out onto the blazing gravel drive.

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"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going tolet any one smoke a cigarette first?"

"Everybody smoked all through lunch."

"Oh, let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss."He didn't answer.

"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan."

They went up-stairs to get ready while we three men stood there shufflingthe hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered alreadyin the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but notbefore Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.

"Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.

"About a quarter of a mile down the road."

"Oh."

A pause.

"I don't see the idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely."Women get these notions in their heads----"

"Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an upper window.

"I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside.

Gatsby turned to me rigidly:

"I can't say anything in his house, old sport."

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----"I hesitated.

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that wasthe inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, thecymbals' song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king's daughter,the golden girl. . . .

Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followedby Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth andcarrying light capes over their arms.

"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, greenleather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade."

"Is it standard shift?" demanded Tom.

"Yes."

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"Well, you take my coupe and let me drive your car to town."

The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.

"I don't think there's much gas," he objected.

"Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge."And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You can buy anything at adrug-store nowadays."

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tomfrowning, and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliarand vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words,passed over Gatsby's face.

"Come on, Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby'scar. "I'll take you in this circus wagon."

He opened the door, but she moved out from the circle of his arm.

"You take Nick and Jordan. We'll follow you in the coupe."

She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan andTom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby's car, Tom pushed theunfamiliar gears tentatively, and we shot off into the oppressive heat,leaving them out of sight behind.

"Did you see that?" demanded Tom.

"See what?"

He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known allalong.

"You think I'm pretty dumb, don't you?" he suggested. "Perhaps I am, butI have a--almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do.Maybe you don't believe that, but science----"

He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back fromthe edge of the theoretical abyss.

"I've made a small investigation of this fellow," he continued. "I couldhave gone deeper if I'd known----"

"Do you mean you've been to a medium?" inquired Jordan humorously.

"What?" Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. "A medium?"

"About Gatsby."

"About Gatsby! No, I haven't. I said I'd been making a smallinvestigation of his past."

"And you found he was an Oxford man," said Jordan helpfully.

"An Oxford man!" He was incredulous. "Like hell he is! He wears a

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pink suit."

"Nevertheless he's an Oxford man."

"Oxford, New Mexico," snorted Tom contemptuously, "or something likethat."

"Listen, Tom. If you're such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?"demanded Jordan crossly.

"Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married--God knowswhere!"

We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of itwe drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's fadedeyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby's caution aboutgasoline.

"We've got enough to get us to town," said Tom.

"But there's a garage right here," objected Jordan. "I don't want to getstalled in this baking heat." Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, andwe slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson's sign. After a moment theproprietor emerged from the interior of his establishment and gazedhollow-eyed at the car.

"Let's have some gas!" cried Tom roughly. "What do you think we stoppedfor--to admire the view?"

"I'm sick," said Wilson without moving. "Been sick all day."

"What's the matter?"

"I'm all run down."

"Well, shall I help myself?" Tom demanded. "You sounded well enoughon the phone."

With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his facewas green.

"I didn't mean to interrupt your lunch," he said. "But I need moneypretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with yourold car."

"How do you like this one?" inquired Tom. "I bought it last week."

"It's a nice yellow one," said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.

"Like to buy it?"

"Big chance," Wilson smiled faintly. "No, but I could make some moneyon the other."

"What do you want money for, all of a sudden?"

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"I've been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want togo West."

"Your wife does," exclaimed Tom, startled.

"She's been talking about it for ten years." He rested for a momentagainst the pump, shading his eyes. "And now she's going whether she wantsto or not. I'm going to get her away."

The coupe flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of awaving hand.

"What do I owe you?" demanded Tom harshly.

"I just got wised up to something funny the last two days," remarkedWilson. "That's why I want to get away. That's why I been bothering youabout the car."

"What do I owe you?"

"Dollar twenty."

The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I hada bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicionshadn't alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had somesort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock hadmade him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had madea parallel discovery less than an hour before--and it occurred to methat there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, soprofound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was sosick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty--as if he had just gotsome poor girl with child.

"I'll let you have that car," said Tom. "I'll send it over to-morrowafternoon."

That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broadglare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had beenwarned of something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes ofDoctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, aftera moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensityfrom less than twenty feet away.

In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved asidea little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossedwas she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and oneemotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowlydeveloping picture. Her expression was curiously familiar--it was anexpression I had often seen on women's faces, but on Myrtle Wilson'sface it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that hereyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on JordanBaker, whom she took to be his wife.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as wedrove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his

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mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slippingprecipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on theaccelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leavingWilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour,until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight ofthe easy-going blue coupe.

"Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool," suggested Jordan."I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There'ssomething very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funnyfruits were going to fall into your hands."

The word "sensuous" had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but beforehe could invent a protest the coupe came to a stop, and Daisy signaled usto draw up alongside.

"Where are we going?" she cried.

"How about the movies?"

"It's so hot," she complained. "You go. We'll ride around and meet youafter." With an effort her wit rose faintly, "We'll meet you on somecorner. I'll be the man smoking two cigarettes."

"We can't argue about it here," Tom said impatiently, as a truck gaveout a cursing whistle behind us. "You follow me to the south side ofCentral Park, in front of the Plaza."

Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car,and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came intosight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and outof his life forever.

But they didn't. And we all took the less explicable step of engagingthe parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us intothat room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in thecourse of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around mylegs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. Thenotion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bath-roomsand take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place tohave a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazyidea."--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, orpretended to think, that we were being very funny. . . .

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already fouro'clock, opening the windows admitted Only a gust of hot shrubbery fromthe Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us,fixing her hair.

"It's a swell suite," whispered Jordan respectfully, and every onelaughed.

"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning around.

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"There aren't any more."

"Well, we'd better telephone for an axe----"

"The thing to do is to forget about the heat," said Tom impatiently."You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it."

He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the table.

"Why not let her alone, old sport?" remarked Gatsby. "You're the one thatwanted to come to town."

There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nailand splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, "Excuse me."--butthis time no one laughed.

"I'll pick it up," I offered.

"I've got it." Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered "Hum!" in aninterested way, and tossed the book on a chair.

"That's a great expression of yours, isn't it?" said Tom sharply.

"What is?"

"All this 'old sport' business. Where'd you pick that up?"

"Now see here, Tom," said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, "ifyou're going to make personal remarks I won't stay here a minute. Callup and order some ice for the mint julep."

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound andwe were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding Marchfrom the ballroom below.

"Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally.

"Still--I was married in the middle of June," Daisy remembered,"Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?"

"Biloxi," he answered shortly.

"A man named Biloxi. 'blocks' Biloxi, and he made boxes--that's afact--and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee."

"They carried him into my house," appended Jordan, "because we livedjust two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddytold him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died." After amoment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, "Therewasn't any connection."

"I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis," I remarked.

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"That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left.He gave me an aluminum putter that I use to-day."

The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floatedin at the window, followed by intermittent cries of "Yea-ea-ea!"and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.

"We're getting old," said Daisy. "If we were young we'd rise and dance."

"Remember Biloxi," Jordan warned her. "Where'd you know him, Tom?"

"Biloxi?" He concentrated with an effort. "I didn't know him. He was afriend of Daisy's."

"He was not," she denied. "I'd never seen him before. He came down inthe private car."

"Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville.Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had roomfor him."

Jordan smiled.

"He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president ofyour class at Yale."

Tom and I looked at each other blankly.

"Biloxi?"

"First place, we didn't have any president----"

Gatsby's foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

"By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you're an Oxford man."

"Not exactly."

"Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford."

"Yes--I went there."

A pause. Then Tom's voice, incredulous and insulting: "You must have gonethere about the time Biloxi went to New Haven."

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but,the silence was unbroken by his "thank you." and the soft closing of thedoor. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

"I told you I went there," said Gatsby.

"I heard you, but I'd like to know when."

"It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I

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can't really call myself an Oxford man."

Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were alllooking at Gatsby.

"It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after theArmistice," he continued. "We could go to any of the universities inEngland or France."

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewalsof complete faith in him that I'd experienced before.

Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.

"Open the whiskey, Tom," she ordered, "and I'll make you a mint julep.Then you won't seem so stupid to yourself. . . . Look at the mint!"

"Wait a minute," snapped Tom, "I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one morequestion."

"Go on," Gatsby said politely.

"What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?"

They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.

"He isn't causing a row." Daisy looked desperately from one to theother. "You're causing a row. Please have a little self-control."

"Self-control!" Repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thingis to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people beginby sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'llthrow everything overboard and have intermarriage between blackand white."

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone onthe last barrier of civilization.

"We're all white here," murmured Jordan.

"I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I supposeyou've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have anyfriends--in the modern world."

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he openedhis mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

"I've got something to tell YOU, old sport----" began Gatsby. But Daisyguessed at his intention.

"Please don't!" she interrupted helplessly. "Please let's all go home.Why don't we all go home?"

"That's a good idea." I got up. "Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink."

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"I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me."

"Your wife doesn't love you," said Gatsby. "She's never loved you.She loves me."

"You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom automatically.

Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.

"She never loved you, do you hear?" he cried. "She only married youbecause I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terriblemistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!"

At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted withcompetitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them hadanything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariouslyof their emotions.

"Sit down, Daisy," Tom's voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternalnote. "What's been going on? I want to hear all about it."

"I told you what's been going on," said Gatsby. "Going on for fiveyears--and you didn't know."

Tom turned to Daisy sharply.

"You've been seeing this fellow for five years?"

"Not seeing," said Gatsby. "No, we couldn't meet. But both of us lovedeach other all that time, old sport, and you didn't know. I used to laughsometimes."--but there was no laughter in his eyes----" to think that youdidn't know."

"Oh--that's all." Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergymanand leaned back in his chair.

"You're crazy!" he exploded. "I can't speak about what happened five yearsago, because I didn't know Daisy then--and I'll be damned if I see how yougot within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the backdoor. But all the rest of that's a God damned lie. Daisy loved me whenshe married me and she loves me now."

"No," said Gatsby, shaking his head.

"She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideasin her head and doesn't know what she's doing." He nodded sagely. "Andwhat's more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spreeand make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart Ilove her all the time."

"You're revolting," said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice,

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dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: "Do youknow why we left Chicago? I'm surprised that they didn't treat you tothe story of that little spree."

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

"Daisy, that's all over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter anymore. Just tell him the truth--that you never loved him--and it's allwiped out forever."

She looked at him blindly. "Why--how could I love him--possibly?"

"You never loved him."

She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,as though she realized at last what she was doing--and as though she hadnever, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now.It was too late.

"I never loved him," she said, with perceptible reluctance.

"Not at Kapiolani?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"No."

From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting upon hot waves of air.

"Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoesdry?" There was a husky tenderness in his tone. . . . "Daisy?"

"Please don't." Her voice was cold, but the rancor was gone from it.She looked at Gatsby. "There, Jay," she said--but her hand as she triedto light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette andthe burning match on the carpet.

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now--isn't thatenough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly."I did love him once--but I loved you too."

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.

"You loved me TOO?" he repeated.

"Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive.Why--there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know,things that neither of us can ever forget."

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

"I want to speak to Daisy alone," he insisted. "She's all excited now----"

"Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom," she admitted in a pitifulvoice. "It wouldn't be true."

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"Of course it wouldn't," agreed Tom.

She turned to her husband.

"As if it mattered to you," she said.

"Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you from now on."

"You don't understand," said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. "You're notgoing to take care of her any more."

"I'm not?" Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford tocontrol himself now. "Why's that?"

"Daisy's leaving you."

"Nonsense."

"I am, though," she said with a visible effort.

"She's not leaving me!" Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby."Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring heput on her finger."

"I won't stand this!" cried Daisy. "Oh, please let's get out."

"Who are you, anyhow?" broke out Tom. "You're one of that bunch thathangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem--that much I happen to know. I've madea little investigation into your affairs--and I'll carry it furtherto-morrow."

"You can suit yourself about that, old sport." said Gatsby steadily.

"I found out what your 'drug-stores' were." He turned to us and spokerapidly. "He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug-storeshere and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one ofhis little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I sawhim, and I wasn't far wrong."

"What about it?" said Gatsby politely. "I guess your friend Walter Chasewasn't too proud to come in on it."

"And you left him in the lurch, didn't you? You let him go to jail fora month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subjectof YOU."

"He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, oldsport."

"Don't you call me 'old sport'!" cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing."Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scaredhim into shutting his mouth."

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That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby's face.

"That drug-store business was just small change," continued Tom slowly,"but you've got something on now that Walter's afraid to tell meabout."

I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsbyand her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisiblebut absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back toGatsby--and was startled at his expression. He looked--and this is saidin all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had"killed a man." For a moment the set of his face could be described injust that fantastic way.

It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything,defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But withevery word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gavethat up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slippedaway, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, strugglingunhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

The voice begged again to go.

"PLEASE, Tom! I can't stand this any more."

Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage,she had had, were definitely gone.

"You two start on home, Daisy," said Tom. "In Mr. Gatsby's car."

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

"Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuouslittle flirtation is over."

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated,like ghosts, even from our pity.

After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle ofwhiskey in the towel.

"Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?"

I didn't answer.

"Nick?" He asked again.

"What?"

"Want any?"

"No . . . I just remembered that to-day's my birthday."

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of anew decade.

It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with him and started

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for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but hisvoice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on thesidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathyhas its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic argumentsfade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decadeof loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinningbrief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan besideme, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgottendreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan facefell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke ofthirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside theashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept throughthe heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage, andfound George Wilson sick in his office--really sick, pale as his ownpale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed, butWilson refused, saying that he'd miss a lot of business if he did.While his neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket brokeout overhead.

"I've got my wife locked in up there," explained Wilson calmly."She's going to stay there till the day after to-morrow, and then we'regoing to move away."

Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years, andWilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generallyhe was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working, he sat on achair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passedalong the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in anagreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own.

So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilsonwouldn't say a word--instead he began to throw curious, suspiciousglances at his visitor and ask him what he'd been doing at certaintimes on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy, someworkmen came past the door bound for his restaurant, and Michaelis tookthe opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn't.He supposed he forgot to, that's all. When he came outside again,a little after seven, he was reminded of the conversation because heheard Mrs. Wilson's voice, loud and scolding, down-stairs in the garage.

"Beat me!" he heard her cry. "Throw me down and beat me, you dirtylittle coward!"

A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands andshouting--before he could move from his door the business was over.

The "death car." as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came outof the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and thendisappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of itscolor--he told the first policeman that it was light green. The othercar, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yardsbeyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life

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violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick darkblood with the dust.

Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn openher shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her leftbreast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listenfor the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at thecorners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendousvitality she had stored so long.

We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were stillsome distance away.

"Wreck!" said Tom. "That's good. Wilson'll have a little businessat last."

He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping, until,as we came nearer, the hushed, intent faces of the people at the garagedoor made him automatically put on the brakes.

"We'll take a look," he said doubtfully, "just a look."

I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantlyfrom the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupe and walkedtoward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my God!" uttered overand over in a gasping moan.

"There's some bad trouble here," said Tom excitedly.

He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into thegarage, which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire basketoverhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat, and with a violentthrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.

The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; itwas a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivalsderanged the line, and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.

Myrtle Wilson's body, wrapped in a blanket, and then in anotherblanket, as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night, lay on awork-table by the wall, and Tom, with his back to us, was bending overit, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking downnames with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first Icouldn't find the source of the high, groaning words that echoedclamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on theraised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding tothe doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a lowvoice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his shoulder,but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from theswinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk back tothe light again, and he gave out incessantly his high, horrible call:

"Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! oh, Ga-od! oh, my Ga-od!"

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and, after staring around the

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garage with glazed eyes, addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to thepoliceman.

"M-a-y-." the policeman was saying, "-o----"

"No, r-." corrected the man, "M-a-v-r-o----"

"Listen to me!" muttered Tom fiercely.

"r" said the policeman, "o----"

"g----"

"g----" He looked up as Tom's broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder."What you want, fella?"

"What happened?--that's what I want to know."

"Auto hit her. Ins'antly killed."

"Instantly killed," repeated Tom, staring.

"She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn't even stopus car."

"There was two cars," said Michaelis, "one comin', one goin', see?"

"Going where?" asked the policeman keenly.

"One goin' each way. Well, she."--his hand rose toward the blankets butstopped half way and fell to his side----" she ran out there an' the onecomin' from N'york knock right into her, goin' thirty or forty miles anhour."

"What's the name of this place here?" demanded the officer.

"Hasn't got any name."

A pale well-dressed negro stepped near.

"It was a yellow car," he said, "big yellow car. New."

"See the accident?" asked the policeman.

"No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster'n forty. Goingfifty, sixty."

"Come here and let's have your name. Look out now. I want to get hisname."

Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson, swayingin the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice amonghis gasping cries:

"You don't have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind ofcar it was!"

Watching Tom, I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten

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under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and, standingin front of him, seized him firmly by the upper arms.

"You've got to pull yourself together," he said with soothinggruffness.

Wilson's eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and thenwould have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.

"Listen," said Tom, shaking him a little. "I just got here a minute ago,from New York. I was bringing you that coupe we've been talking about.That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn't mine--do you hear? Ihaven't seen it all afternoon."

Only the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said, but thepoliceman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculenteyes.

"What's all that?" he demanded.

"I'm a friend of his." Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm onWilson's body. "He says he knows the car that did it . . . it was a yellowcar."

Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.

"And what color's your car?"

"It's a blue car, a coupe."

"We've come straight from New York," I said.

Some one who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this, andthe policeman turned away.

"Now, if you'll let me have that name again correct----" Picking upWilson like a doll, Tom carried him into the office, set him down in achair, and came back.

"If somebody'll come here and sit with him," he snappedauthoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glancedat each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut thedoor on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding thetable. As he passed close to me he whispered: "Let's get out."

Self-consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, wepushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor,case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.

Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend--then his foot came downhard, and the coupe raced along through the night. In a little while Iheard a low husky sob, and saw that the tears were overflowing down hisface.

"The God damned coward!" he whimpered. "He didn't even stop his car."

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The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustlingtrees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second floor,where two windows bloomed with light among the vines.

"Daisy's home," he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me andfrowned slightly.

"I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There's nothing we cando to-night."

A change had come over him, and he spoke gravely, and with decision.As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed ofthe situation in a few brisk phrases.

"I'll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you're waitingyou and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you somesupper--if you want any." He opened the door. "Come in."

"No, thanks. But I'd be glad if you'd order me the taxi. I'll waitoutside."

Jordan put her hand on my arm.

"Won't you come in, Nick?"

"No, thanks."

I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan lingeredfor a moment more.

"It's only half-past nine," she said.

I'd be damned if I'd go in; I'd had enough of all of them for one day,and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something ofthis in my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up theporch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my headin my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler'svoice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from thehouse, intending to wait by the gate.

I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped frombetween two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by thattime, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of hispink suit under the moon.

"What are you doing?" I inquired.

"Just standing here, old sport."

Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was goingto rob the house in a moment; I wouldn't have been surprised to seesinister faces, the faces of 'Wolfshiem's people,' behind him in thedark shrubbery.

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"Did you see any trouble on the road?" he asked after a minute.

"Yes."

He hesitated.

"Was she killed?"

"Yes."

"I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It's better that the shockshould all come at once. She stood it pretty well."

He spoke as if Daisy's reaction was the only thing that mattered.

"I got to West Egg by a side road," he went on, "and left the car in mygarage. I don't think anybody saw us, but of course I can't be sure."

I disliked him so much by this time that I didn't find it necessary totell him he was wrong.

"Who was the woman?" he inquired.

"Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did ithappen?"

"Well, I tried to swing the wheel----" He broke off, and suddenly Iguessed at the truth.

"Was Daisy driving?"

"Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course I'll say I was. You see,when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it wouldsteady her to drive--and this woman rushed out at us just as we werepassing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but itseemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebodyshe knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the othercar, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my handreached the wheel I felt the shock--it must have killed her instantly."

"It ripped her open----"

"Don't tell me, old sport." He winced. "Anyhow--Daisy stepped on it.I tried to make her stop, but she couldn't, so I pulled on the emergencybrake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.

"She'll be all right to-morrow," he said presently. "I'm just going towait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantnessthis afternoon. She's locked herself into her room, and if he tries anybrutality she's going to turn the light out and on again."

"He won't touch her,' I said. "He's not thinking about her."

"I don't trust him, old sport."

"How long are you going to wait?"

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"All night, if necessary. Anyhow, till they all go to bed."

A new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy hadbeen driving. He might think he saw a connection in it--he might thinkanything. I looked at the house; there were two or three bright windowsdown-stairs and the pink glow from Daisy's room on the second floor.

"You wait here," I said. "I'll see if there's any sign of a commotion."

I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly,and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open,and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had dinedthat June night three months before, I came to a small rectangle of lightwhich I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn, but I founda rift at the sill.

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table,with a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles ofale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in hisearnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in awhile she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or theale--and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable airof natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said thatthey were conspiring together.

As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along thedark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him inthe drive.

"Is it all quiet up there?" he asked anxiously.

"Yes, it's all quiet." I hesitated. "You'd better come home and getsome sleep."

He shook his head.

"I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport."

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to hisscrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness ofthe vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in themoonlight--watching over nothing.

Chapter 8

I couldn't sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on theSound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage,frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive,

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and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress--I felt that Ihad something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morningwould be too late.

Crossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he wasleaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.

"Nothing happened," he said wanly. "I waited, and about four o'clock shecame to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned outthe light."

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when wehunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtainsthat were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall forelectric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon thekeys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dusteverywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn't been aired formany days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, drycigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of thedrawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.

"You ought to go away," I said. "It's pretty certain they'll traceyour car."

"Go away NOW, old sport?"

"Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal."

He wouldn't consider it. He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knewwhat she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and Icouldn't bear to shake him free.

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth withDan Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby." had broken up like glassagainst Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was playedout. I think that he would have acknowledged anything now, withoutreserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.

She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealedcapacities he had come in contact with such people, but alwayswith indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitinglydesirable. He went to her house, at first with other officersfrom Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him--he had never beenin such a beautiful house before. but what gave it an air of breathlessintensity, was that Daisy lived there--it was as casual a thing to heras his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it,a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than otherbedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through itscorridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already inlavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shiningmotor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. Itexcited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increasedher value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house,

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pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident.However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present apenniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisiblecloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the mostof his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he hadno real right to touch her hand.

He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her underfalse pretenses. I don't mean that he had traded on his phantommillions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; helet her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum asherself--that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter offact, he had no such facilities--he had no comfortable family standingbehind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal governmentto be blown anywhere about the world.

But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he hadimagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--butnow he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just howextraordinary a "nice" girl could be. She vanished into her richhouse, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He feltmarried to her, that was all.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless,who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the boughtluxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionablyas she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth.She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charmingthan ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mysterythat wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes,and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hotstruggles of the poor.

"I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her,old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but shedidn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lotbecause I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was,'way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, andall of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing greatthings if I could have a better time telling her what I was goingto do?" On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisyin his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with firein the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and hechanged his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. Theafternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deepmemory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never beencloser in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly onewith another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat'sshoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as thoughshe were asleep.

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He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he wentto the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority andthe command of the divisional machine-guns. After the Armistice hetried frantically to get home, but some complication ormisunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now--therewas a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters. She didn't see whyhe couldn't come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside,and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and bereassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchidsand pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm ofthe year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in newtunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of theBEALE STREET BLUES. while a hundred pairs of golden and silverslippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there werealways rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever,while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by thesad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with theseason; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day withhalf a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads andchiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floorbeside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for adecision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decisionmust be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionablepracticality--that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of TomBuchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and hisposition, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certainstruggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he wasstill at Oxford.

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest ofthe windows down-stairs, filling the house with gray-turning,gold-turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dewand ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was aslow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool,lovely day.

"I don't think she ever loved him." Gatsby turned around from a windowand looked at me challengingly. "You must remember, old sport, she wasvery excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way thatfrightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper.And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying."

He sat down gloomily.

"Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they werefirst married--and loved me more even then, do you see?"

Suddenly he came out with a curious remark.

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"In any case," he said, "it was just personal."

What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity inhis conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?

He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their weddingtrip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisvilleon the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking thestreets where their footsteps had clicked together through theNovember night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to whichthey had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had alwaysseemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so hisidea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervadedwith a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have foundher--that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach--he was pennilessnow--was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on afolding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliarbuildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellowtrolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once haveseen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as itsank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishingcity where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his handdesperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment ofthe spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by toofast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part ofit, the freshest and the best, forever.

It was nine o'clock when we finished breakfast and went out on theporch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and therewas an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby'sformer servants, came to the foot of the steps.

"I'm going to drain the pool to-day, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves'll start fallingpretty soon, and then there's always trouble with the pipes."

"Don't do it to-day," Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically."You know, old sport, I've never used that pool all summer?"

I looked at my watch and stood up.

"Twelve minutes to my train."

I didn't want to go to the city. I wasn't worth a decent stroke of work,but it was more than that--I didn't want to leave Gatsby. I missed thattrain, and then another, before I could get myself away.

"I'll call you up," I said finally.

"Do, old sport."

"I'll call you about noon."

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We walked slowly down the steps.

"I suppose Daisy'll call too." He looked at me anxiously, as if hehoped I'd corroborate this.

"I suppose so."

"Well, good-by."

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge Iremembered something and turned around.

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth thewhole damn bunch put together."

I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gavehim, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he noddedpolitely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understandingsmile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against thewhite steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestralhome, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with thefaces of those who guessed at his corruption--and he had stood on thosesteps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.

I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him forthat--I and the others.

"Good-by," I called. "I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby."

Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on aninterminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair.Just before noon the phone woke me, and I started up with sweatbreaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often calledme up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movementsbetween hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to findin any other way. Usually her voice came over the wire as somethingfresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had comesailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.

"I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead, and I'm going downto Southampton this afternoon."

Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the actannoyed me, and her next remark made me rigid.

"You weren't so nice to me last night."

"How could it have mattered then?"

Silence for a moment. Then:

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"However--I want to see you."

"I want to see you, too."

"Suppose I don't go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?"

"No--I don't think this afternoon."

"Very well."

"It's impossible this afternoon. Various----"

We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren't talking anylonger. I don't know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know Ididn't care. I couldn't have talked to her across a tea-table that day ifI never talked to her again in this world.

I called Gatsby's house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. Itried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire wasbeing kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out mytime-table, I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then Ileaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.

When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crosseddeliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there'd be acurious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for darkspots in the dust, and some garrulous man telling over and over whathad happened, until it became less and less real even to him and hecould tell it no longer, and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement wasforgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at thegarage after we left there the night before.

They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She musthave broken her rule against drinking that night, for when shearrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that theambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her ofthis, she immediately fainted, as if that was the intolerable part ofthe affair. Some one, kind or curious, took her in his car and droveher in the wake of her sister's body.

Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the frontof the garage, while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on thecouch inside. For a while the door of the office was open, andevery one who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it.Finally someone said it was a shame, and closed the door. Michaelis andseveral other men were with him; first, four or five men, later two orthree men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to waitthere fifteen minutes longer, while he went back to his own place and madea pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.

About three o'clock the quality of Wilson's incoherent muttering

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changed--he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. Heannounced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belongedto, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife hadcome from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry "Oh,my God!" again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attemptto distract him.

"How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sitstill a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?"

"Twelve years."

"Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked you aquestion. Did you ever have any children?"

The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and wheneverMichaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to himlike the car that hadn't stopped a few hours before. He didn't like to gointo the garage, because the work bench was stained where the body hadbeen lying, so he moved uncomfortably around the office--he knew everyobject in it before morning--and from time to time sat down beside Wilsontrying to keep him more quiet.

"Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if youhaven't been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the churchand get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?"

"Don't belong to any."

"You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must havegone to church once. Didn't you get married in a church? Listen, George,listen to me. Didn't you get married in a church?"

"That was a long time ago."

The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking--for a moment hewas silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came backinto his faded eyes.

"Look in the drawer there," he said, pointing at the desk.

"Which drawer?"

"That drawer--that one."

Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it buta small, expensive dog-leash, made of leather and braided silver. It wasapparently new.

"This?" he inquired, holding it up.

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Wilson stared and nodded.

"I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but Iknew it was something funny."

"You mean your wife bought it?"

"She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau."

Michaelis didn't see anything odd in that, and he gave Wilson a dozenreasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But conceivablyWilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle,because he began saying "Oh, my God!" again in a whisper--his comforterleft several explanations in the air.

"Then he killed her," said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.

"Who did?"

"I have a way of finding out."

"You're morbid, George," said his friend. "This has been a strain to youand you don't know what you're saying. You'd better try and sit quiettill morning."

"He murdered her."

"It was an accident, George."

Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightlywith the ghost of a superior "Hm!"

"I know," he said definitely, "I'm one of these trusting fellas and Idon't think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I knowit. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and hewouldn't stop."

Michaelis had seen this too, but it hadn't occurred to him that there wasany special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had beenrunning away from her husband, rather than trying to stop anyparticular car.

"How could she of been like that?"

"She's a deep one," said Wilson, as if that answered the question."Ah-h-h----"

He began to rock again, and Michaelis stood twisting the leash inhis hand.

"Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?"

This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend:there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when

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he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, andrealized that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock it was blue enoughoutside to snap off the light.

Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grayclouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faintdawn wind.

"I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she mightfool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window."--with aneffort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his facepressed against it----" and I said 'God knows what you've been doing,everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!'"

Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at theeyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous,from the dissolving night.

"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.

"That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turnaway from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there along time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

By six o'clock Michaelis was worn out, and grateful for the sound of acar stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night beforewho had promised to come back, so he cooked breakfast for three, whichhe and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now, and Michaeliswent home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to thegarage, Wilson was gone.

His movements--he was on foot all the time--were afterward traced to PortRoosevelt and then to Gad's Hill, where he bought a sandwich that hedidn't eat, and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walkingslowly, for he didn't reach Gad's Hill until noon. Thus far there wasno difficulty in accounting for his time--there were boys who had seen aman "acting sort of crazy," and motorists at whom he stared oddly fromthe side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view.The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he "hada way of finding out," supposed that he spent that time going fromgarage to garage thereabout, inquiring for a yellow car. On the otherhand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and perhaps hehad an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. Byhalf-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the way toGatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name.

At two o'clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with thebutler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at thepool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amusedhis guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.

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Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn't to be taken outunder any circumstances--and this was strange, because the front rightfender needed repair.

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once hestopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if heneeded help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared amongthe yellowing trees.

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep andwaited for it until four o'clock--until long after there was any one togive it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn'tbelieve it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was truehe must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a highprice for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked upat an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as hefound what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight wasupon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without beingreal, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, driftedfortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towardhim through the amorphous trees.

The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfshiem's proteges--heard theshots--afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything muchabout them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and myrushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed anyone. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, fourof us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener, and I, hurried down to the pool.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as thefresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other.with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the ladenmattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind thatscarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidentalcourse with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leavesrevolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circlein the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardenersaw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust wascomplete.

Chapter 9

After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and thenext day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers andnewspaper men in and out of Gatsby's front door. A rope stretchedacross the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, butlittle boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard, and

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there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool.Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used theexpression "madman." as he bent over Wilson's body that afternoon, andthe adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaperreports next morning.

Most of those reports were a nightmare--grotesque, circumstantial,eager, and untrue. When Michaelis's testimony at the inquest brought tolight Wilson's suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale wouldshortly be served up in racy pasquinade--but Catherine, who might havesaid anything, didn't say a word. She showed a surprising amount ofcharacter about it too--looked at the coroner with determined eyes underthat corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seenGatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that hersister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it,and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was morethan she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged bygrief." in order that the case might remain in its simplist form. Andit rested there.

But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself onGatsby's side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news ofthe catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, andevery practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised andconfused; then, as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe orspeak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because noone else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personalinterest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called herinstinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone awayearly that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.

"Left no address?"

"No."

"Say when they'd be back?"

"No."

"Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?"

"I don't know. Can't say."

I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where helay and reassure him: "I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don't worry.Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you----"

Meyer Wolfshiem's name wasn't in the phone book. The butler gave me hisoffice address on Broadway, and I called Information, but by the time Ihad the number it was long after five, and no one answered the phone.

"Will you ring again?"

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"I've rung them three times."

"It's very important."

"Sorry. I'm afraid no one's there."

I went back to the drawing-room and thought for an instant that they werechance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled it. But,as they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with unmoved eyes,his protest continued in my brain:

"Look here, old sport, you've got to get somebody for me. You've gotto try hard. I can't go through this alone."

Some one started to ask me questions, but I broke away and going up-stairslooked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk--he'd never told medefinitely that his parents were dead. But there was nothing--only thepicture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence, staring down fromthe wall.

Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem,which asked for information and urged him to come out on the nexttrain. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he'dstart when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there'd be a wirefrom Daisy before noon--but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived; noone arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men.When the butler brought back Wolfshiem's answer I began to have afeeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and meagainst them all.

DEAR MR. CARRAWAY. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of mylife to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a madact as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now asI am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up inthis thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let meknow in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about athing like this and am completely knocked down and out.

Yours truly MEYER WOLFSHIEM

and then hasty addenda beneath:

Let me know about the funeral etc. do not know his family at all.

When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago wascalling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection camethrough as a man's voice, very thin and far away.

"This is Slagle speaking . . ."

"Yes?" The name was unfamiliar.

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"Hell of a note, isn't it? Get my wire?"

"There haven't been any wires."

"Young Parke's in trouble," he said rapidly. "They picked him up when hehanded the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New Yorkgiving 'em the numbers just five minutes before. What d'you know aboutthat, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns----"

"Hello!" I interrupted breathlessly. "Look here--this isn't Mr. Gatsby.Mr. Gatsby's dead."

There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by anexclamation . . . then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.

I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatzarrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender wasleaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.

It was Gatsby's father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed,bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. Hiseyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag andumbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparsegray beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on thepoint of collapse, so I took him into the music room and made him sitdown while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn't eat, and theglass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.

"I saw it in the Chicago newspaper," he said. "It was all in the Chicagonewspaper. I started right away."

"I didn't know how to reach you." His eyes, seeing nothing, movedceaselessly about the room.

"It was a madman," he said. "He must have been mad."

"Wouldn't you like some coffee?" I urged him.

"I don't want anything. I'm all right now, Mr.----"

"Carraway."

"Well, I'm all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?" I took him intothe drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there. Some littleboys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when Itold them who had arrived, they went reluctantly away.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouthajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated andunpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has thequality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for thefirst time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the greatrooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be mixedwith an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom up-stairs; while he tookoff his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had beendeferred until he came.

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"I didn't know what you'd want, Mr. Gatsby----"

"Gatz is my name."

"--Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body West."

He shook his head.

"Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position inthe East. Were you a friend of my boy's, Mr.--?"

"We were close friends."

"He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man, buthe had a lot of brain power here."

He touched his head impressively, and I nodded.

"If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill.He'd of helped build up the country."

"That's true," I said, uncomfortably.

He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed,and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep.

That night an obviously frightened person called up, and demanded to knowwho I was before he would give his name.

"This is Mr. Carraway," I said.

"Oh!" He sounded relieved. "This is Klipspringer." I was relieved too,for that seemed to promise another friend at Gatsby's grave. I didn'twant it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd, so I'd beencalling up a few people myself. They were hard to find.

"The funeral's to-morrow," I said. "Three o'clock, here at the house.I wish you'd tell anybody who'd be interested."

"Oh, I will," he broke out hastily. "Of course I'm not likely to seeanybody, but if I do."

His tone made me suspicious.

"Of course you'll be there yourself."

"Well, I'll certainly try. What I called up about is----"

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "How about saying you'll come?"

"Well, the fact is--the truth of the matter is that I'm staying withsome people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be withthem to-morrow. In fact, there's a sort of picnic or something.Of course I'll do my very best to get away."

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I ejaculated an unrestrained "Huh!" and he must have heard me, for he wenton nervously:

"What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. Iwonder ifit'd be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. Yousee, they're tennis shoes, and I'm sort of helpless without them. Myaddress is care of B. F.----"

I didn't hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.

After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby--one gentleman to whom Itelephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that wasmy fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly atGatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor, and I should have knownbetter than to call him.

The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see MeyerWolfshiem; I couldn't seem to reach him any other way. The door that Ipushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked "The SwastikaHolding Company," and at first there didn't seem to be any one inside.But when I'd shouted "hello." several times in vain, an argument brokeout behind a partition, and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at aninterior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.

"Nobody's in," she said. "Mr. Wolfshiem's gone to Chicago."

The first part of this was obviously untrue, for someone had begun towhistle "The Rosary," tunelessly, inside.

"Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him."

"I can't get him back from Chicago, can I?"

At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem's, called "Stella!"from the other side of the door.

"Leave your name on the desk," she said quickly. "I'll give it to himwhen he gets back."

"But I know he's there."

She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly upand down her hips.

"You young men think you can force your way in here any time," shescolded. "We're getting sickantired of it. When I say he's in Chicago,he's in Chicago."

I mentioned Gatsby.

"Oh--h!" She looked at me over again. "Will you just--What was your name?"

She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the doorway,holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in areverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me

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a cigar.

"My memory goes back to when I first met him," he said. "A youngmajor just out of the army and covered over with medals he gotin the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniformbecause he couldn't buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him waswhen he come into Winebrenner's poolroom at Forty-third Street andasked for a job. He hadn't eat anything for a couple of days. 'come onhave some lunch with me,' I sid. He ate more than four dollars' worth offood in half an hour."

"Did you start him in business?" I inquired.

"Start him! I made him."

"Oh."

"I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw rightaway he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he toldme he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join upin the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off hedid some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick likethat in everything."--he held up two bulbous fingers----" alwaystogether."

I wondered if this partnership had included the World's Series transactionin 1919.

"Now he's dead," I said after a moment. "You were his closest friend,so I know you'll want to come to his funeral this afternoon."

"I'd like to come."

"Well, come then."

The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly, and as he shook his head hiseyes filled with tears.

"I can't do it--I can't get mixed up in it," he said.

"There's nothing to get mixed up in. It's all over now."

"When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way.I keep out. When I was a young man it was different--if a friend of minedied, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that'ssentimental, but I mean it--to the bitter end."

I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come,so I stood up.

"Are you a college man?" he inquired suddenly.

For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a "gonnegtion," but heonly nodded and shook my hand.

"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not

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after he is dead," he suggested. "After that my own rule is to leteverything alone."

When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West Eggin a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and foundMr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in hisson and in his son's possessions was continually increasing and now hehad something to show me.

"Jimmy sent me this picture." He took out his wallet with tremblingfingers. "Look there."

It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty withmany hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. "Look there!" andthen sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I thinkit was more real to him now than the house itself.

"Jimmy sent it to me. I think it's a very pretty picture. It shows upwell."

"Very well. Had you seen him lately?"

"He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live innow. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see nowthere was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me." He seemedreluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute,lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled fromhis pocket a ragged old copy of a book called HOPALONG CASSIDY.

"Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just showsyou."

He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see.On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the dateSeptember 12, 1906. and underneath:

Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.00 A.M.Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30 "Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15 "Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30 P.M.Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.30-5.00 "Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 "Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . . 7.00-9.00 "

GENERAL RESOLVESNo wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]No more smokeing or chewingBath every other dayRead one improving book or magazine per weekSave $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per weekBe better to parents

"I come across this book by accident," said the old man. "It just shows

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you, don't it?"

"It just shows you."

"Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this orsomething. Do you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He wasalways great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat himfor it."

He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and thenlooking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down thelist for my own use.

A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, andI began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So didGatsby's father. And as the time passed and the servants came in andstood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and hespoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glancedseveral times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to waitfor half an hour. But it wasn't any use. Nobody came.

About five o'clock our procession of three cars reached the cemeteryand stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate--first a motor hearse,horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in thelimousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postmanfrom West Egg in Gatsby's station wagon, all wet to the skin. As westarted through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and thenthe sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I lookedaround. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had foundmarvelling over Gatsby's books in the library one night three monthsbefore.

I'd never seen him since then. I don't know how he knew about thefuneral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, andhe took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolledfrom Gatsby's grave.

I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already toofar away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisyhadn't sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur,"Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then the owl-eyedman said "Amen to that," in a brave voice.

We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoketo me by the gate.

"I couldn't get to the house," he remarked.

"Neither could anybody else."

"Go on!" He started. "Why, my God! they used to go there by thehundreds." He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.

"The poor son-of-a-bitch," he said.

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One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep schooland later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther thanChicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of aDecember evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up intotheir own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I rememberthe fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that's andthe chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead aswe caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations:"Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?"and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paulrailroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks besidethe gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and thedim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild bracecame suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walkedback from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of ouridentity with this country for one strange hour, before we meltedindistinguishably into it again.

That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swedetowns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the streetlamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of hollywreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, alittle solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacentfrom growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings arestill called through decades by a family's name. I see now that thishas been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy andJordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed somedeficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly awareof its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond theOhio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only thechildren and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality ofdistortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantasticdreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, atonce conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhangingsky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dresssuits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies adrunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles overthe side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at ahouse--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no onecares.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distortedbeyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittleleaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on theline I decided to come back home.

There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasantthing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted toleave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferentsea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over andaround what had happened to us together, and what had happened

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afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a bigchair.

She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like agood illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair thecolor of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerlessglove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment thatshe was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though there wereseveral she could have married at a nod of her head, but I pretended tobe surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn't making amistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to saygood-bye.

"Nevertheless you did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You threw meover on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was anew experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while."

We shook hands.

"Oh, and do you remember."--she added----" a conversation we had onceabout driving a car?"

"Why--not exactly."

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of meto make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and callit honor."

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendouslysorry, I turned away.

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking aheadof me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out alittle from his body as if to fight off interference, his head movingsharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as Islowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning intothe windows of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back,holding out his hand.

"What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?"

"Yes. You know what I think of you."

"You're crazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't knowwhat's the matter with you."

"Tom," I inquired, "what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?"He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right aboutthose missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after meand grabbed my arm.

"I told him the truth," he said. "He came to the door while we were

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getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren't in hetried to force his way up-stairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if Ihadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in hispocket every minute he was in the house----" He broke off defiantly."What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threwdust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's, but he was a toughone. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stoppedhis car."

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable factthat it wasn't true.

"And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when Iwent to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sittingthere on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God itwas awful----"

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was,to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things andcreatures and then retreated back into their money or their vastcarelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let otherpeople clean up the mess they had made. . . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly asthough I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store tobuy a pearl necklace--or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons--rid of myprovincial squeamishness forever.

Gatsby's house was still empty when I left--the grass on his lawn hadgrown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village nevertook a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute andpointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over toEast Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a storyabout it all his own. I didn't want to hear it and I avoided him when Igot off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzlingparties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear themusic and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and thecars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material carthere, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn'tinvestigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at theends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house oncemore. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with apiece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it,drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to thebeach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly anylights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt awayuntil gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered

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once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world.Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, hadonce pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams;for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in thepresence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplationhe neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time inhistory with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought ofGatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end ofDaisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream musthave seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did notknow that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscuritybeyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on underthe night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year byyear recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--to-morrowwe will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one finemorning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly intothe past.

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